My first Sampler. The ASR 10

The ASR-10 was the first sampler that I owned. It was big, weighed a ton and was built like a tank. I can well remember dragging it up flights of stairs to play gigs and parties.

Happy days but couldn't do it now

It was a 16-bit sampler that also came with rack-mountable varieties. It can be used as an instrument, but it built a reputation for being one of the first devices to allow CD quality samples at 2 MB worth (which could go up towards 16).

The ASR-10 stands for the Advanced Sampling Recorder - a completely digital music production studio. It's a 16-bit sampler that came in both keyboard and rack-mount versions. It shipped with 2 MB of sample memory which could be expanded to 16 MB for a few minutes of stereo cd-quality sampling time. I expanded mine, back in the day 16MB was huge.?

The ASR 10 was the weapon of choice for many of the top hip-hop producers back in the day. Trail-blazing artists like Kanye West, Timbaland and The Neptunes used the sampler to craft their sound.

Today's samplers have gigabytes of memory.

But in many ways, the limitation was a bonus as It taught me how to chop samples to save memory

I could choose from sample rates of 30 to 44.1 kHz and had professional sample editing functions auto-looping, volume smoothing, normalising, crossfading, and time comp/exp.

It also had a feature called Trans wave which I could never fathom, remember this was in the days before YouTube, and with no online tutorials we had to work it out for ourselves.?

It had built-in effects, still some of the best that I have ever heard. You could resample through the effects which were groundbreaking at the time.

But for me, the killer feature was the onboard Sequencer. I could hook up my synths and trigger these from the ASR 10. This was how I used to perform live at those dodgy parties that I found myself at.

The ASR 10 has been out of production for years but the value has been growing, they now change hands for over ￡2000 which was what I paid for mine all those years ago. The reason is the sound. The sound of the ASR 10 is unique. You can reduce the sample rate for some real digital crunch that just cannot be reproduced with today's kit.

Mine lives in my loft. Sadly the power supply failed a few years ago. ??

One day I will get it repaired and renew my love affair with this beast of a sampler ??